As
the EPA creates thousands of pages of highly questionable new rules
on CO2 emissions, they are rapidly becoming the high priesthood over
our economy and the lives of every man, woman and child in America.

The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seems to be on a drunken
binge to impose increasingly economy-killing regulations to reduce CO2
emissions. These new regulations are based on flimsy pseudoscience and
what amounts to religious tenants of faith that humans are destroying
mother earth. Nonetheless, the EPA claims that current air and water
emissions endanger human health. The most ridiculous of these assertions
is carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

CO2
Emissions and Global Warming

Nearly
a half of the U.S. electricity production is from coal and another 23
percent from natural gas. Only 2 percent comes from wind and solar.

The
United States (U.S) currently produces nearly 70 percent of its electricity
from coal and natural gas; both of which emit millions of tons of CO2.
Because of their near-religious belief that this is causing global warming,
relentless environmental
pseudoscience has convinced President Obama that this perceived warming
will destroy the earth. Obama has therefore committed the U.S. to drastically
reduce CO2 emissions by converting to green alternative energy, which
currently only produces 4 percent of our electricity, even though it
will “cause energy prices to necessarily skyrocket.”

Economy-wrecking
cap and trade legislation has been introduced in Congress over the years
to force the U.S. to go to green energy. Although Americans rejected
all of these efforts, President Obama had a backup plan; have the
EPA create regulations without Congressional approval that would cut
just as much CO2 emissions.

The
EPA got its authority to impose these economy-wrecking rules from none
other than the U.S. Supreme Court in a ruling on Massachusetts v.
EPA in 2007. The Court based its entire ruling on the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim that man is causing
global warming. The Court said in a 5-4 decision that that CO2 threatens
the world through global warming. Therefore CO2
is covered by the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of
an “air pollutant.”

Since
then, the Climategate email scandal and a series of revelations that
the IPCC’s 2007 report was fraught with pseudoscience and errors
has all but thoroughly discredited the IPCC as a source, despite a huge
government effort to whitewash the revelations.[1]
A new release of another 5,000 emails was released in November, 2011.
This new damning set of pirated emails is being called Climategate
2. In spite of this avalanche of contrary evidence, the EPA did
none of its own research to show CO2 was truly a pollutant, as is required
by law, but instead based its endangerment ruling solely on the “findings”
of the IPCC.

Alan
Carlin, a mid-level employee of the EPA since 1967 wrote a critical
98 page report in 2011 asserting, “We believe our concerns and
reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review
of the science by the EPA.” Carlin’s supervisor (an Obama
appointee), quashed his report and warned him in an email, “I
don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change.
No papers, no research, etc.” So much for an unbiased EPA.

The
EPA’s ruling is so bad that the EPA’s Inspector General
(IA) released its own highly
critical report on September 26, 2011 stating the EPA’s scientific
findings “were not made available to the public as would be required
for reviews of highly influential scientific assessments.” The
report went on to say, the EPA “did not fully meet the independence
requirements for reviews of highly influential scientific assessments
because one of the panelists was an EPA employee.”

To
be sure, the IA’s report was based on procedural, not scientific
matters. But the cat is out of the bag now which appears to be forcing
the IPCC to back off of its man-is-destroying-the-earth proclamations
in its 2007 report. In its upcoming
2012 report the IPPC states in the draft executive summary,

Projected
changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally
do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but
these [man-made] signals are relatively small compared to natural
climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected
changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain.
(Italics added)

This
astonishing admission by the IPCC may in part be the result of new research
in 2011 that shows that the man-made warming theory is wrong because
it is based on the wrong assumptions. Dr. Roy Spencer, former head of
NASA’s Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer unit and now principal
research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville has clearly
shown
that the theory of man-made global warming is incorrect;
finding that the theory’s required increase in cirrus (thin high
elevation) clouds is just not happening. In fact, he found that ‘the
satellite observations suggest there is much
more heat energy lost to space during and after warming than the
climate models show.” So far the challenges to Spencer’s
research by alarmist scientists have not
shown that Spencer is wrong.

The
theory of man-caused global warming is based upon the fact that a slight
increase in atmospheric CO2 caused by burning oil, gas and coal results
in a slight increase in temperature, which then leads to increased thunderstorm
activity in the tropical region from 30oN to 30oSouth of the Equator.
As these thunderstorms decay, they theoretically leave high, thin cirrus
clouds behind which then trap heat at about 6-16 km in height (left
graphic). It is the cirrus clouds that cause warming of the entire earth,
not CO2. There is no disagreement among scientists on this. However,
actual temperature readings (right) show no evidence of this. Research
in 2011 clearly shows that this extra heat quickly dissipates into space
and does not cause warming.5 Source of graphics: S. Fred Singer. Nature,
Not Human Activity Rules the Climate. The
Heartland Institute, 2008, p. 6. Used by permission.

Additionally,
there is the glaring admission by NOAA and NASA that the sun
is going into hibernation similar to the Maunder Minimum in the
1800s, in which earth’s temperatures were much cooler than today.
That means we may be heading into 25-30 years of significant cooling.
This is supported by the past 11 years of highly variable temperatures
which do not show any warming of the earth as it transits into a cooling
period.

Economic
Impacts

The
EPA has ignored this compelling contradictory evidence, and is moving
full-steam ahead to implement its draconian regulations. By doing so
it also ignored the fact that plants must have CO2 to survive and grow.
CO2 is literally what plants take in as food. Science has shown that
nearly all plants are starved for CO2. More CO2 means more plant growth
and therefore human food production. Plants then give off the oxygen
all animals must have to live. CO2 is essential for life on earth and
there is actually too little of it!

So
zealous is the EPA in ignoring real science that it had to bend the
Clean Air Act to the breaking point to implement its new regulations.
The Act requires the EPA to regulate any facility emitting more than
250 tons of pollutant a year (in this case CO2). According to the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, however, this would include “literally
millions of small entities — big box stores, apartment and office
buildings, hospitals, schools, large houses of worship, Dunkin’
Donut shops.” It would also require an
army of 230,000 full-time EPA employees, producing 1.4 billion work
hours to administer, cost billions of dollars and wipe out millions
of jobs, year after year.

The
EPA knew that fielding an army of 230,000 EPA storm troopers to stop
Dunkin’ Donuts from baking our morning pastries would never fly.
So the EPA simply, unilaterally and arbitrarily rewrote the Clean Air
Act, revising the emission minimum for CO2 from 240 tons to 25,000 tons,
a mere 100 times what the law required. Never fear though, the regulation
will be incrementally increased to include more and more businesses
and people as environmentalists file premeditated lawsuits in the future.

Called
the Boiler MACT Rule (Mercury and Air Toxics Standards) , the regulations
are allegedly designed reduce CO2 emissions. The EPA’s new minimum
of 25,000 tons per year primarily targets coal and natural gas fired
electrical generating facilities and refineries – two primary
targets that Obama has said during his 2008 campaign that he wanted
to make so expensive that his green energy program would look cost competitive.
However, this comes with severe consequences. Along with other new EPA
regulations, many coal-fired generating facilities will just close their
doors. Analysts
predict the United States as a whole will lose 17,000 to 60,000
Megawatts by 2017. Seventeen thousand Megawatts is about equal to all
the power
produced for use in Wisconsin in 2011, while 60,000 megawatts will
supply about
60 million homes.

Consumers
in many states will pay 20% more for electricity by 2014 or shortly
thereafter. In Illinois, electricity rates are expected to skyrocket
40-60%. For businesses, these price hikes will be major disincentives
to hiring new workers. Struggling families will have even less for basic
necessities…. Even the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers says within a few years EPA’s new rules will cost up to
50,000 jobs in the utility, coal mining and railroad industries alone
– and 200,000 jobs overall.

The
longer the time the EPA rules are in place the worse it gets. The highly
respected and non-partisan American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
published a detailed 91 page analysis which found that Boiler MACT will
shut down or negatively impact 753 coal-fired electricity-generating
plants with a concurrent loss of 827,000 jobs and up to 272 gigawatts
of electricity of the total
of 1137.3 (25 percent) produced in 2010 at a cost of $33.4 billion
annually. An additional 7.3 million jobs will be threatened by 2020.
All this without ANY demonstrated benefits in health.

For
consumers, ALEC
determined Boiler MACT regulations impact on refineries and home electricity
costs by 50 percent, 75 percent for industrial electricity and residential
natural gas prices, and 600 percent for electric utility coal prices.
The EPA’s only justification for these economy- and job-destroying
regulations is that it will reduce CO2 emissions that these progressive
scientists, bureaucrats and politicians claim is causing man-caused
global warming. As demonstrated above, that claim has no basis in fact.
Hence, ALEC concludes, “These costs come with little to no environmental
benefit.”

That’s
not all. The Wall
Street Journal reports that the EPA’s new ozone requirement
(another greenhouse gas) by itself will add over $90 billion dollars
in compliance costs to manufacture’s. Worse, 85 percent of all
counties in the U.S. will be in violation of the new standards costing
hundreds of billions more as they try to comply “in vain attempts
to meet unachievable standards.” That’s not including the
tens of billions more that will result from the full implementation
of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act. That, however, is another story.
The EPA predicts huge benefits from these draconian regulations, but
independent analyses show only a few cents of benefits for every dollar
of cost.

Apparently
Obama doesn’t care as much about jobs and affordable living for
the poor as he claims. He is hell-bent to force us to use green energy
at any cost to the citizens of America; rich or poor. The EPA claims
the benefits of its new regulations will exceed costs by tens of billions
of dollars while improving the health for millions of Americans. To
paraphrase Driessen, only environmental and community organizer ideologues
can believe in the tortured logic used to justify such hogwash.

The
current Administration is using EPA and other agencies to stop the use
of affordable energy at every turn. Their actions are leaving investment
dollars on the sidelines due to uncertainty. They have ground the permit
process to a halt. New regulations on power plants are making it costly
and impractical to burn coal to provide electricity. It’s [an]
all-out effort to stop the ability to access coal, and where they can’t
do that with a straight face, they will look to eliminate all of our
customers. Apparently EPA believes they can control the laws of both
supply and demand, all to the detriment of our economy.

Carey’s
warning is very serious. Obama and the progressives in Congress have
put us on a very dangerous path to economic ruin based on an unscientific,
fear-driven belief that man is causing global warming. Along with thousands
of pages of other rules ostensibly to make us more “sustainable,”
the EPA is morphing into a high priesthood for an emerging new environmental
religion that is based on nothing more than pseudoscience created to
justify their fear that mother earth is being destroyed by capitalism
and the free market system.

Dr.
Coffman is President of Environmental Perspectives Incorporated (epi-us.com)
and CEO of Sovereignty International (sovereignty.net) in Bangor Maine.
He has had over 30 years of university teaching, research and consulting
experience in forestry and environmental sciences. He produced the acclaimed
DVD Global Warming or Global Governance (warmingdvd.com). His newest book,
Rescuing a Broken America (rescuingamericabook.com) is receiving wide
acclaim. He can be reached at 207-945-9878.

Carey’s warning
is very serious. Obama and the progressives in Congress have put us on
a very dangerous path to economic ruin based on an unscientific, fear-driven
belief that man is causing global warming.